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The Present State of Research in South American Mythology

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The Present State of Research in South American Mythology Numcn. Vol. XXV, Fasc. 3 THE PRESENT STATE OF RESEARCH IN SOUTH AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY Since it is impossible to present South American mythology as a unified whole, for no such unity exists,x or as the isolated lore of each tribe, 2 because this would be an endless task, we shall confine our attention to a select number of indigenous societies within a few 1 As the majority of the general works on mythology divide the subject ac- cording to geographic areas, South American mythology appears in them side by side with African and Oceanic mythologies, for instance. Sometimes it is a part of "American mythology," or of "Latin American mythology." In fact, all these divisions are more or less arbitrary. There is an irreducible variety among South American traditional stories and, on the other hand, many mytho- logical motifs coincide with those of Central and North America, and in some cases with motifs of the mythologies of the Old World. Mythology, as psy- chology and human anatomy, is basically one around the world. Collections of retold South American myths will be found in Hartley Burr Alexander, The Mythology of all Races, vol. 11 : Latin America (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920) ; Max Fauconnet, "Mythology of the Two Americas," in Laroussc Encyclopedia of Mythology, ed. Felix Guirand (London: Hamlyn, 1959, first published in French as Laroiisse Mythologie Generate by Librairie Larousse, Paris, 1936) ; and Mariano Izquierdo Gallo, C.M.F., Mitologia amcricana (Madrid: Guadarrama, !957)- F°r a masterful but too brief synthesis, see A. Metraux, "South America: Creation and Destruction," in Larousse World Mythology, ed. Pierre Grimaldi (London: Hamlyn, 1973, first published in French by Librairie Larousse, Paris, 1963). In Harald Osborne, South American Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1968) the myths of the Andean peoples take up most of the available space; the pic- tures are excellent. In Veronica Ions, The World's Mythology in Color (London: Hamlyn, 1974) the brief section on South America again is almost totally devoted to Andean mythology. 2 It is practically impossible to estimate the number of tribal groups living at present in South America. There is no universally accepted concept of tribe, and most censuses of Indian populations are unreliable. We also have only approxi- mate figures for Indian languages. It has been reported that archival materials contain two to three thousand names of languages, many of which must be synonyms for or dialects of languages already counted. Modern linguists estimate that there may be around 1,500 different South American languages, present or extinct. "Some of these languages are disappearing, or even being eliminated by genocide; a few, such as Quechua, continue to spread to people who previously did not know them but many—including some spoken by only a few hundred people each—appear to be 'quietly holding their own.'" Arthur P. Sorensen, Jr., "South American Indian Linguistics at the Turn of the Seventies," in Peoples and Cultures of Native South America, ed. Daniel R. Gross (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/The Natural History Press, 1973), p. 313. Slate of Research in South American Mythology 241 easily recognizable geographic and culture areas, 3 and discuss some of the major developments in our knowledge of their mythology since the completion of the Handbook of South American Indians. 4 The decision to take the Handbook as a point of reference is not an entirely arbitrary one. Its compilation took place during the first years of the Second World War, digesting materials that represented research carried out mainly since the end of the nineteenth century. 5 3 Among the first essays toward a scientifically based culture area map of South America are those of W. Schmidt, "Kulturkrcisc and Kulturschichten in Sudamerika" {Zeitschrift fur Eihnologie, vol. 45, pp. 1014-1130, Berlin, 1913), which takes into consideration mythology. His conclusions are today considered obsolete. Clark Wissler (1917, 1938) broke up the continent into the following culture areas: Antilles, Chibcha, Inca, Amazonas, and (odd as it may seem) Guanaco, the last mentioned comprising most of the present territory of Argen- tina and Uruguay. Today the most influential classifications are those of J. M. Cooper (1925, 1941, 1942), who divided South America into sierral, silval, and marginal areas, and J. H. Steward, editor of the Handbook of South American Indians (1946, 1949), who added the Circum Caribbean area concept to Cooper's classification. G. M. Murdock (1951) has refined these maps by proposing 24 culture areas. G. R. Willey, An Introduction to American Archeology, vol. 2, South America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971) reproduces Cooper's, Steward's, and Murdock's maps, and briefly discusses them. He also proposes another division, based on archeological categories. Murdock's classi- fication, useful as a filing device for the Human Relations Area Files, has been criticized by J. H. Rowe in his review of Murdock's Outlines of South American Cultures {American Antiquity, vol. 18, 3, pp. 279-280, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1953). Rowe rejects the culture area idea as theoretically unsound and misleading in practice. In this article we use it as a classificatory term based on well-known geographic nomenclature. In the above-mentioned works of Alexander and Izquierdo Gallo the following divisions are used for the dis- cussion of the myths: Alexander-—the Antilles, the Andean North, the Andean South, the Tropical Forests (the Orinoco and Guiana), the Tropical Forests (the Amazon and Brazil), and the Pampas to the Land of Fire. Izquierdo Gallo— the Caribbean, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, Brazil, Gran Chaco, and the Far South (which stands for Guarani, Araucanian, Patagonian, and Fuegian). An overall map based on mythological categories remains to be drawn. 4 Edited by Julian H. Steward (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 143. Vol. 1, 1946; vol. 2, 1946; vol. 3, 1948; vol. 4, 1948; vol. 5, 1949; vol. 6, 1950; vol. 7 [Index], 1959). 5 The chief contributor to the Handbook was Alfred Metraux (1902-1963), who had an unsurpassed knowledge of South American ethnography in general, and of the religions and mythologies in particular. At his death Claude Levi- Strauss wrote: "Alfred Metraux represented the most intimate alliance that has doubtless existed of a living ethnographic experience and a historical scholarship that let no document or source pass unheeded. Nobody among us will ever attain the richness of his learning and his memory" ("Necrologie," Journal de la Societe des Americanistes, vol. 52, p. 301, Paris, 1963). * 16 242 Juan Adolfo Vazquez After World War II several important changes occurred in the sciences of man, substantially affecting our knowledge of the mythology of contemporary indigenous peoples. The following are the most sig- nificant. (1) The use of tape recorders to document the oral traditions that are the natural vehicle of myths. (2) The increasing number of scientifically trained linguists who have been able to transcribe, analyze, and translate aboriginal myths, or check on the translations made by native bilingual informants. (3) The waxing number of those infor- mants who are now ready to volunteer their cooperation and can assist in presenting and interpreting the myths according to the native's point of view. (4) A better understanding of the role of myth in the life of aborigines, and thereby a greater respect for stories that were formerly considered as figments of a childish imagination, or worse. (5) The in- creased prestige of myth as a subject of research in literary, psycho- logical, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, artistic, and religious studies, especially as such studies constitute an integrating approach to culture and symbolism. As a result of all these factors, in the last few decades there has been a spate of publications dealing with the myths of contemporary South American Indians. This fact makes it necessary to revise the idea that mythology is a thing of the past, that Latin American Indian literatures are a chapter of Pre-Columbian cultures, and that the ancient tradi- tions have almost completely died out or have been altered beyond recognition by Western influences. A new picture of the native South America emerges. In many of the general works of South American mythology the Andean civilizations, especially the Chibcha and the Inca, have received a far lengthier treatment than the other aboriginal cultures, which are lumped together under the names of "Tropical Forest Tribes" and "Marginal Tribes." Work done in the field after the Second World War, however, has included both contemporary inhabitants of the Andes and the peoples of other South American areas. We are now in pos- session of mythical texts that significantly enlarge our appreciation of mythology in all areas. While archeology has revealed the importance of the pre-Inca civilizations of the Andes, whose art abounds in myth- ological allusions that are difficult to understand because we lack contemporaneous written documents, ethnography has enriched our libraries with many accounts of myths from contemporary "primitive" State of Research in South American Mythology 243 societies. The mythological picture of South America is no longer dominated by the great ancient civilizations of the Andes and the work of Spanish and mestizo writers of the Colonial period, as the following discussion will show. 6 The Caribbean The Caribbean area is generally considered to be
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